


anacrusis.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Confessions, Episode Tag, Episode: s10e16 Paint It Black, Ficlet, Introspection, M/M, Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 01:14:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3631137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a moment. Until it is spreading down his back in a shudder, and then it is warm and insistent as a hand, pressing the backs of his ribs, squeezing at the place where his heart is already so close to beating. Not a prayer. No, not a prayer: not a string of words like bells on a chain, clear and bright, insistent. Something else. Less clear but just as deep. </p>
<p>A confession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	anacrusis.

It rises in his fingers first: makes him twitch and rub his hands absently, weave his knuckles together and stretch them out, between turns of the page. He sits in silence in the library and feels the smallest tremor in the muscles of the side of his hand. The meat. And then it climbs his jaw, runs down and makes his knee jog and hitch against the table leg. It takes a moment. Until it is spreading down his back in a shudder, and then it is warm and insistent as a hand, pressing the backs of his ribs, squeezing at the place where his heart is already so close to beating. Not a prayer. No, not a prayer: not a string of words like bells on a chain, clear and bright, insistent. Something else. Less clear but just as deep. 

A confession.

Before, before the stolen grace, before the sandwiches and the sluggish pulse he feels sometimes, the ragged border where his divinity fails and something else takes hold- before, back when he was more of one thing and less another, it wasn’t like this. It was always something powerful. Beautiful. But now it is overwhelming, too. Not just a signal but a thousand signals at once, the bleed of foreign feelings dissolving into his own. He used to know where the longing ended and he began: now there is only the same immeasurable longing like a slow roll of waves, incessant, salt to the touch, warm as sunlight. Castiel sits back in his chair and shuts his eyes, puts the palms of his nearly human hands against his face. Breathes in with almost human lungs: tries to find the grace at his middle and hang onto it, so as not to drown completely.

Someday he won’t have even that. He has to be ready, if he can be. He’s done it once, but that was enough to know that it will still be utterly strange. 

Humans say, _falling_ in love. They’re not wrong. But Castiel has fallen, and it wasn’t quite like this. There was vertigo and nausea, cold fear. Unbearable brightness. Occasional joy. But this is not the loss of wings. It’s less vertical, more like a horizon. They pull at him, these almost-prayers. Like a pair of strong hands pulling him across a river, fording him against the current when he fumbles. If the shore seems far, it’s probably because Castiel has no other distance to judge it against. Dean is the monument, the benchmark. Literally the love of his life, of his lives: the lives he has had to start over, again and again. He wonders where he is now, what he is looking at: a sky, a ceiling. A kind face. The weave of the lattice and the shadow behind it. Wonders what triggered this. If he knows he’s bleeding _want_ into the ether, _need_. If he would be embarrassed, shy. Angry at himself, needlessly: or else open at last, like a door. 

Wonders, wonders, wonders.

That would be the confession, if things were reversed: he ought to be dreading the change, and he is. But another part of him welcomes it. A part of him is unafraid. It’s the part that dragged thorns across his palm to fight a _rit zien_ , an animal part. Not grace, but will. Dean would understand. Dean understands more than he pretends to.

Castiel rubs his eyes one more time and settles back into his book, listening to what isn’t quite a prayer, isn’t quite a wish. Not quite a hope, or a desire. Not only one but all of those things, tightly rolled, leaking out where the seams don’t quite hold. No vessel is perfect forever: glass cracks and earth crumbles, they are all crumbling in places too, and Dean talks in his sleep. People aren’t supposed to be perfect, apparently. So maybe that is what Castiel is. What he is going to be. Tomorrow, or the next day. Sometime soon. In the meantime, though- there is this confession, this longing. This length of string, tugged from the opposite end. This voice, begging someone to hear it.

For now, Castiel can listen. So he does.

 

 

.


End file.
